Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of 's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Techno-Ethics and Feminist AI: What Role for an African Studies Approach to Science and Technology?
This post is inspired by the collaborative conceptualization of a workshop on African feminist AI held at ETHOS Lab in May 2025. It is deeply indebted to the ideas shared by the workshop organizers and participants. (more…) (read more...)
From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection
This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (more…) (read more...)
On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu
At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call home. These reactor buildings are of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), envisioned to be India’s largest nuclear park. People living in the nearby Idinthakkarai and Kootapalli villages mock the association of a risky technoscientific complex to anything close to a ‘park,’ or poonga—a forest or garden of flowers, in Tamil. The sea that rolls against the compound of KKNPP is where women protestors claimed that they derived their energy to lead the protest against the plant in March 2011. Following suit, fishermen rowed and drove their boats into the sea to protest the commissioning of the plant. (more…) (read more...)